Brian Gallagher of Fort Worth Paschal labored in the pocket on a
fall night last year and the opposition never relented. Don Gordon
tried blocking a teammate in practice nearly 50 years ago. He lost,
and he didn't come to for several minutes.

They're different players who suited up on different Fridays in
different eras, but they experienced a common outcome, a
concussion.

So much has changed in football over the years, from pads to
formations to 40 times, down to the cloth used for uniforms. But
violence has been a constant. The pop to the head is universal,
timeless, something seen as a badge of honor.

"That's the sport to be honest with you," says Gordon, a former
Garland player. "It's a little bit on the barbaric side."

Gordon played when few knew what concussions were, when bells
were rung and helmets caved in. Only now does he look back and
think he suffered a concussion.

But science and research have taught the football world plenty
about concussions since then, with local athletic trainers such as
Bucky Taylor and Ken Locker spreading the message.

Taylor spent 36 years as Mesquite High School's head athletic
trainer before recently retiring. Locker works as the sports
marketing manager at Texas Health's Ben Hogan Sports Therapy
Institute.

"We know more about concussions the last four years," Locker
says, "than we ever knew before."

Both men accept the inevitability of football's brutal hits, but
not the lax attitude that too often follows the trauma.

Teenagers will always have their stories about hits. But unlike
players of bygone eras, Taylor and Locker say, this generation has
the information it needs to stay safe - if it is willing to make
the right choices.

"A new mind-set," Taylor says, "has to come out about it."

Forgettable moments

Gallagher leans back in a chair inside the Paschal field house.
The air conditioner purrs, granting reprieve from the heat, and he
speaks above the noise.

On a Friday last fall, he suffered a concussion, his first from
football but fourth in his life.

"It's like the day," he says, "never happened."

Pieces of the day float back, but not from Gallagher's own
thoughts. His is a patchwork memory, one stitched from the words of
others.

They say he spent the day at school and then took a 2 ½
-hour bus ride to Abilene. They say he was pumped up for the game,
one against an Abilene High team that would go on to win a state
championship.

And they say the defense creamed him again and again.

Gallagher was the quarterback, the one who led the offense, the
one who stayed in control, but not on that night. He began
repeating nonsensical questions to his teammates. He couldn't
remember the plays.

His teammates called timeout, and the athletic trainer removed
Gallagher from the game. Later that night, clarity returned as he
sat in his father's car. He asked his cousin and father what
happened.

"They told me that we won the state championship," he says, "and
I threw a couple of touchdowns."

Paschal had actually lost badly, and Gallagher had suffered a
concussion. He had no lingering memory problems but didn't practice
for two weeks and needed Ibuprofen to dull the pain of nearly
constant headaches.

Former Frisco Centennial player Andrew Ahfeld suffered a
concussion his junior year, in 2008. He doesn't remember the hit.
He saw it later on tape.

"That year I played defensive nose," he says. "I just remember I
broke through the line and there was a pulling guard, and I got
nailed."

He was taken out of the game, and for 15 minutes, Ahfeld thought
of nothing. Then the fog of a severe headache and nausea settled
in, along with the realization that the athletic trainer hid his
helmet and pads to make sure he wouldn't even think of going back
in.

Soon after, Ahfeld's teammates began teasing him for enduring
such a massive hit.

"That's just how football is," he says. "You get lit up and you
get called out for it."

Learning the hard way

There's a book titled The Trainer's Bible somewhere in Taylor's
house. It was published in the early '50s and was a gift from his
father.

The book describes hard hits as a rite of passage, perhaps even
a routine. Players were supposed to get dizzy and suffer headaches
every once in a while and go back into the game or practice after
sitting out a play or two.

"They poured water on me, I guess," he says. "Things were very,
very fuzzy. ... And then as I remember, I went back to the
drills.

"They tell me since then that a brain concussion is when the
brain hits the cranial cavity. If that's true, that happened in
high school and there's no question that happened."

Untold stories

The following words come from Locker, a certified athletic
trainer who has used computer software to study effects of head
trauma on 15,000 North Texas athletes.

"You have to be tough," he says. "You can't be a wuss."

He's talking about what he calls the double-edged sword of
football, the subtle difference between showing reasonable grit and
offering your body to danger.

Gallagher and Ahfeld were held out of practices and games for
two weeks, but both expressed a desire to play. Although Ahfeld
never seriously considered endangering his health, he sees how
other players could try otherwise.

This desire to hastily return concerns Taylor. Progress has been
made in the diagnosis and treatment of concussions, but he wonders
whether players' attitudes have changed.

Gallagher's teammate, wide receiver Travoy McCarver, also
suffered a concussion last season. During his recuperation, he
says, he snuck out after practices to run laps when he was supposed
to be resting.

"And the trainer didn't want me to do it," he says. "I just knew
I could do it."

Ahfeld described occasionally seeing stars, without dizziness or
headache, after getting hit or making hits last season. He said all
players experience it. And he said no one tells the athletic
trainer, that it's not a big deal.

But when a New England doctor, Ann McKee, has shown a slide of
an 18-year-old brain with early signs of degeneration because of
trauma, Locker believes it's always best to report everything to an
athletic trainer.

"I mean," Locker asks, "did you see stars on your way to work
today? If you did, that's abnormal."

Spread the news

Taylor's not sure how to get teenagers to absorb the dangerous
reality of hard hits to the head. He does, however, say that the
UIL-required learning segment about concussions is poor and amounts
to nothing more than looking at a PowerPoint.

He sees public service announcements by well-known athletes as a
better way, or rules enforced by the NFL and colleges that could
trickle down to get the attention of a high school kid, or even
changing the name of concussion to mild traumatic brain injury.

"You know," he says, "unfortunately it probably would have to
happen to them. Or it would have to happen to a teammate or a
friend they are close to. That's just human nature, I think."

Gallagher plans to play college football at Mary Hardin-Baylor
this fall. Four concussions haven't frightened him away from the
sport he loves.

"As soon as I get better," he says, "I forget about them."

Not long ago, Gallagher was watching the NFL Network when a
special came on about concussions. The program began addressing
their long-term consequences, how they may cause depression and
brain dysfunction, and that was when he decided to change the
channel.

"I feel like I'd be a lot more worried," he says, "if I saw all
of that."